I received some pearls of wisdom the other day about discipline from a tattooed great-grandmother who works at my daughter’s homeschool program.
My wise woman told me that she never had preschoolers in her care give her trouble about walking in a line on sidewalks. When I expressed my doubt that she’d be able to rein my daughter in like that, she let drop a phrase that has stuck with me. “Oh,” she said, “Your daughter has a perimeter. All kids have perimeters. Your daughter’s is just a bit bigger than most.”
What she meant was the for some kids, you need to let out the slack to rein them in. When you take a kid with a “wide perimeter” and try to force them into the small enclosed behavioral space that you keep other kids in, it backfires on you.
What she also meant was an almost heretical thing to say in modern education: not all kids are the same. No matter how hard you try, some kids are not going to be good at taking tests, some kids are not going to be good at raising their hands quietly, and some kids are not going to be able to catch a ball. In every classroom, you have (hopefully) a good representation of kids who fall somewhere in the middle. But you are always going to have kids that fall outside that perimeter, and what do you do with them?
When you call my daughter on every little infraction of the rules, the infractions increase. Teachers who try to keep her on the straight and narrow fail. A good example is circle time. At her old school, a private Montessori, she was required to come to circle time. The teacher tried everything: giving her a five-minute warning, positive reinforcement, negative consequences, you name it. But she didn’t like circle time much. When she was left to her own devices, she’d sometimes join in. But the more her teacher tried to get her to join, the less she wanted to.
After leaving that school, we went to visit her homeschool program. I told the teacher, “She just doesn’t DO circle time.” No problem, the teacher said. She can join if she wants to. After a couple of weeks in the program, my daughter noticed that no one was forcing her to sit in the circle, and she started to join in…when she felt like it.
The fact is, in our society we recognize that rules don’t apply equally in many ways. It’s illegal to beat someone up, but if you both agree to wear gloves, follow some rules, and do it in front of an audience, you can try to knock someone out and not get arrested.
So what does it mean in a classroom, or in a family, when you admit that rules don’t apply equally? It causes problems, of course. In our family, we first have the issue of age. Our two children are four years apart, so rules can’t always apply equally. Our son has to do many things alone that our daughter gets help with — and conversely, our son GETS to do many things alone that our daughter would love to be able to do. There’s also the issue of “perimeters.” Our son has a very, very small perimeter. I spent much of his preschool years working on helping him to be more confident. When he was small, he spent time outside of the home literally attached to the adult he was with. When I dropped him at preschool, I would “hook” him onto his teacher so that I could make my escape!
It’s taken me years to be comfortable with the fact that my six-year-old needs the opposite treatment. She really needs to feel like she has the ability to make her own choices, depend on her own body, and have her own opinions. This means I have to turn off the mother who hooks her son into each new environment, and find that mother who expresses confidence in her daughter then looks away, or at least pretends to. If I send my daughter across the street to get the mail from our box, she does it well and confidently. If I watch her, that, to her, expresses my lack of confidence in her.
This is very hard to translate to a classroom. Her Montessori teacher constantly sent the message that she didn’t trust my daughter, and my daughter received that message loud and clear. When I told the teacher she had to let go a bit more, she said, “But the other kids will see that I’m not applying the rules fairly.” I agree that this is a problem. But I see the difference when adults work with my daughter. The ones who want to rein her in fail. The ones who “get” her and are able to give her space while also guiding her in the right direction, do fine.
One year I had her enrolled in two different preschools, one private preschool, and the Watsonville Adult School program in my son’s school. She was having big problems at her main preschool, but not in the other. I asked her teacher at the Adult School program one day about this difference in behavior.
Her teacher (a former motorcycle gang member) let drop her own pearls of wisdom. “Your daughter’s a strong girl, and I like strong girls,” she said. That was all the explanation she needed to give.
Love her, and let her loose.
